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Elizabeth: The Golden Age

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Cert: 12A

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Dir: Shekhar Kapur. Cast: Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen, Abbie Cornish, Samantha Morton, Jordi Molla

 

Description: The year is 1585 and Elizabeth I has been on the throne for almost three decades. Across the Channel, Spain's king Phillip II is preparing to despatch his fleet of ships with the intention of installing Mary Stuart on the throne. Elizabeth's relationship with seafarer Sir Walter Raleigh sets tongues a-wagging, but his heart belongs to lady in waiting, Bess, who is soon with child. When the queen learns of the betrayal, her rage becomes a guiding light in the battle against the Spanish.

Country: UK/FR. 2007. 114mins

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Queen of the screen

 

Frustrated desire: Blanchett's nuanced performance as the Virgin Queen lends much-needed subtlety to Shekhar Kapur's screenplay

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History, they say, is bunk. So no one should expect accuracy from films which pitch a romantic version of it to audiences who won't all have the patience for, or the curiosity about, the real thing.

Shekhar Kapur's new movie, following on in time from his well-liked first essay into the life and times of Elizabeth I, is exceedingly romantic and gets more so as it goes on. It is beautiful to look at - that's for certain. Alexandra Byrne's costumes alone make it worth seeing, and the cinematography from Remi Adefarasin is not far behind. There's luxury at every turn. But seeing is not quite the same as believing.

What Kapur has given us is a first hour of fact skilfully mixed with fiction, and a last section about the Armada victory that Bollywood might envy. You might, of course, like this bit best and wish the rest of the film had given itself over to melodrama. But you also might regret that the effort to attract a wide audience has so compromised the proceedings.

As for the acting, Cate Blanchett, reprising an older version of the Queen, gives a performance that makes the screenplay seem more subtle than it actually is. Others have made notable Virgin Queens in the cinema or on the telly. But none has so thoroughly grasped the fact that this was a woman who had to be a monarch first and a woman second.

None of the supporting cast lets her down - not even Clive Owen as a Walter Raleigh, whose breeches, according to this film, she would so have liked to undo, and who appears more akin to Douglas Fairbanks Jr than the real man. Still, when he jumps the vessel he is using as a fireship during the Armada battle and swims to safety, you do wonder if he is secretly auditioning to be the next Bond.

There are times when even a dim student of history such as myself wonders why Kapur and his team have made a garish mountain out of a story that really doesn't need embellishing. And it is strange that it has taken an Indian to make Elizabeth into so patriotic a figure that you expect the national anthem to command us all to stand up at the end, like we used to do in former days at the cinema.

But though the last third of the film plays unnecessary tricks with history, the first two-thirds at least make a decent fist of telling us how it might have been. Admittedly, the thwarted romance between the Queen and Raleigh is fairly good bunk but it does give Blanchett the chance to show her frustrated sexual desire and her fury when the fanciable men who flitted around her got married - in this case, to Abbie Cornish's excellent Bess Throckmorton.

In fact, this central part of the film would have been more appropriate to her feelings for Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, than Raleigh - but then this is not supposed to be the last word on the sexual struggles of England's greatest monarch. It's much more of a tribute to her that a woman could somehow transcend the murderous politicking of the time.

The other much smaller portrait that deserves mention is that of Samantha Morton as Mary, Queen of Scots, who is portrayed as a woman who lacked that ability and paid for it with her life. Geoffrey Rush's Walsingham, finally admitting to the Queen that he had got it wrong by urging the execution, since it meant the Catholic Spanish would determine to avenge the death, is another fine effort.

If this is a film that irritates nearly as much as it pleases, we do get a sense of the times, and of the lady in question. The eyes, if not the brain, are certainly given a workout that they will remember.

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